Chapter 2
Chapter Two
FORREST
I would have agreed to a hundred percent.
When I opened the door and saw Sterling standing there, I would have agreed to anything. In the year since I’d finally told her the truth about who I was and why I’d come to Sawyers Bend, she hadn’t spoken a word to me. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. And now here she was, on my doorstep.
If she’d asked me straight out, I would have given her everything. But by the time she made it into my kitchen, I remembered this was Sterling Sawyer I was dealing with, and I had to be a lot smarter than just giving her whatever she asked for.
I’d tried throwing my heart at her feet. She’d kicked it back to me with a furious glare.
I got it. I did. I’d lied.
I’d lied a lot. Over and over.
Not about being in love with her. Not about how I felt or what I wanted. But I’d lied about who I was, why I was there, why I’d asked her out the first time. Those kinds of lies hadn’t mattered when I’d first met her. I’d underestimated her, just like everyone else did. And by the time I realized how badly I’d fucked up, how much she meant to me, I was out of time.
I’d planned to tell her the truth. I was going to do it, I just… I was waiting for the right time. And then fucking Elliot Hall and the Learys had shown up, and I couldn’t lie any longer.
I got the statue back, but I lost Sterling.
Now, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t care about the money.
I mean, yeah, I guess I was a little because it was money, and it really helped to do things like pay the bills and put a roof over my head. After my father died, my mother worked hard, but times were tough. My father’s fortune would have come in handy. But those years were behind us. My mom was good. I was better than good. I’d worked my ass off, and while I wasn’t the genius that my father had been, I’d inherited enough of his brains to land myself some pretty good opportunities.
I wasn’t a billionaire, but I had enough in the bank to honestly say that if it was a contest between my father’s mysterious fortune and Sterling, I’d pick Sterling any day.
The second I’d said I didn’t care about the money, I saw the dismissal on her face. She wouldn’t even look at me. It didn’t matter if it was true—telling her I didn’t care about the money was a waste of time. She didn’t believe me. And why should she, when I’d told her so many lies already?
So, I did what I was born to do. I negotiated. Maybe someday I’d win her trust back, but I couldn’t do that unless I could get her to spend time with me. When she shoved her chair back and stood, I thought for a minute that I’d pushed too far, that I’d lost before we had a chance to start again. But she hadn’t walked out. She’d come at me with a reasonable solution. Twenty-five percent was the perfect compromise. Enough that Sterling felt she’d won something and low enough that she’d believe I cared about the money, which was the only thing she was willing to believe.
I didn’t care about the money, but I was curious to know how Sterling was going to find it. Plenty of people had puzzled over those numbers, and so far, no one had found a damn thing. If Sterling said she knew the answer, I believed her. People had been underestimating Sterling Sawyer for her entire life. At first, I’d been one of them. I knew better now.
I paused as if I was considering her offer of twenty-five percent. I couldn’t let her think I’d caved too easily. “Agreed,” I said.
Sterling sat back down at the table, pulled the spiral-bound notebook and pen toward her, and began to write. I made out the date and the beginning of a sentence before she scribbled it out and started over on a fresh sheet. I waited, growing more curious by the second.
Finally, she said, “Read this. I’m not a lawyer, but it should be good enough. If I find the money, I get twenty-five percent of what’s in the account. If it leads to multiple accounts, I get twenty-five percent of the total. If it leads to a combination of cash, securities, or other goods, I get twenty-five percent of the total value.”
I read through what she had written up, signed, and pushed it back to her with the pen. Sterling signed and took a picture of the contract with her phone. Business concluded, she pushed her phone aside and picked up the little statue of Vitellius.
“You know the key to break the code,” I guessed.
Her eyes flashed up to me, and for just a second, I caught the real Sterling through the guarded mask she wore. There she was, so alive, that sharp brain firing behind eyes so blue they made the summer sky seem faded. It was a Sterling I’d only caught sight of in our last days together a year ago, a Sterling I longed for.
A heartbeat later, the mask came down like blinds dropping, and her eyes flicked back to the statue. “Mhm,” she said.
Confirmation? Denial? I couldn’t tell.
She picked up the statue, turning it in her hands. Gently, she set it down on its base and pressed her thumbs to the edges of one of the brass medallions. I wasn’t expecting to see it turn a quarter rotation and quietly click into a new position. I stared down at the statue. I’d handled that thing for more hours than I could count, wondering what the hell my father had been up to, what he wanted me to see, and I’d never felt the medallions move.
Sterling turned the statue, staring at it, lost in thought, reaching slowly before her fingers settled against the next brass medallion, and she turned it in the opposite direction. This time, it rotated halfway around before clicking into place. The third medallion turned almost all the way around before I heard the click. The final medallion didn’t turn at all.
With a single press of Sterling’s finger, that medallion sank several millimeters into the base before popping open like a tiny door. Sterling ignored my indrawn breath. I didn’t know what I expected to see inside. A secret compartment, maybe? But the marble behind the medallion was indented only slightly, revealing more numbers and letters, these far bigger than those engraved on the base. The alphanumeric string was arranged above and below a line, like the longest fraction I’d ever seen.
Sterling grabbed the spiral-bound notebook and roughly turned from our signed contract to a fresh page. Picking up the pen, she copied the long fraction onto the top of the page. Once she had it, she closed the medallion, picked up the statue, and looked at me, her eyes on my shoulder, avoiding mine.
“Hold this up so I can see the base,” she ordered.
I did, holding the statue under the light while she used the small magnifying glass and painstakingly copied the alphanumeric string onto the pad in front of her. Whatever she was looking for, I didn’t see it. A massive fraction that couldn’t be a fraction. A long string of numbers and letters that wasn’t an account number. But Sterling very clearly knew exactly what it was.
I watched in fascination as her teeth bit into her perfectly curved pink lip, her eyes flicking back and forth, the pen moving up and down, drawing lines in the air above the paper. Tapping one number, then a letter. Matching. Scribbling something out. Shaking her head. Crossing it out with slashes of dark blue ink and trying again. More scratching out.
Sterling let out a huff of breath, the pen bobbing up and down in her fingers as she stared at the mess of numbers and notes in front of her. What did she see that I didn’t see?
I had no doubt that she was on to something. There was a lot more to Sterling than most people guessed. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. It was the eyes that got me first. So alive, like blue flame. Every inch of her body was perfection, her hair long, golden waves, her soft skin glowing with warmth even in the winter. She had dazzled me at first sight so much that I’d missed the rest—how intelligent she was and funny, sometimes veering into brash. How deeply she loved. And I hadn’t known until far too late that she was wounded and vulnerable and not nearly as guarded against a man like me as I’d assumed she would be.
According to Sterling, she’d partied her way through a handful of different colleges before finally graduating. But when she graduated, it had been with a math degree. That wasn’t the only reason I believed she could unravel the mess on the page in front of her. Sterling wouldn’t be here unless she was damn sure that being near me would be worth the payoff.
For over a year, she’d avoided me like the plague. I hadn’t crowded her, but I’d been around. Working at the inn every day with her brothers. Sitting outside her hospital room when she had a head injury. Helping to board up the windows when her sister’s business was broken into a few months ago. Through all of it, Sterling had acted like I didn’t exist. If she was sitting at my kitchen table, it was because she was absolutely positive she was going to succeed.
I watched her study the page, trying to figure out what she was looking for. I knew my way around numbers. I was the Chief Financial Officer of the Inn at Sawyers Bend. Numbers were my job, but this was not the kind of math I knew, if it was math at all.
Sterling scratched out another set of scribbles and sat back, closing her eyes. She took a deep breath, letting it out in a gust as she lurched forward, dropping the pen. She flipped the notebook around so the giant fraction she’d transcribed from the secret panel was at the bottom of the page and the alphanumeric string from the base was at the middle of the page, both upside down.
Head to the side, eyes narrowed on the page, Sterling pulled her lip between her teeth, biting down so hard I wanted to protest. But Sterling’s lip wasn’t any of my business anymore, so I kept my mouth shut. A second later, she sucked in a sharp breath, bounced in her seat, and tore off the page. Flipping the notebook back around, she started again, this time transposing the fraction she’d found behind the secret panel so the bottom line was now on the top. She copied the alphanumeric string from the base below the rearranged fraction, her eyes popping back and forth.
It still didn’t make sense to me, but Sterling snatched up the pen and began to write. “Holy fucking shit,” she whispered to herself, the pen moving faster. She lifted her face to mine, her eyes bright and glowing with triumph. “Holy fucking shit, Forrest. Do you see this?”
I didn’t. Not at first. She slashed out with the pen, dividing the long string of letters and numbers into sections, and I saw it: East Eagle. 1523. KCUB. B42001.
“Is that an address?” Sterling asked. “East Eagle? It sounds like a street name.” She looked at me, expectant, and the words teased at the back of my brain.
East Eagle . She was right. It did sound like a street. And more than that, it sounded familiar.
My first instinct was to think of Sawyers Bend. And Boston, where I’d lived before I’d moved here. But this was my father’s code. What did East Eagle mean to him? And then it snapped into place: Willow Springs. I’d grown up there, a sleepy little town too far west of Atlanta to qualify as a suburb, at least back then. Like many small towns, Willow Springs had a Main Street. And branching off Main Street, just past the town hall, was Eagle Street.
“East Eagle Street,” I said slowly, my mind flying back in time. “In Willow Springs, Georgia.”
Sterling grabbed her phone, tapping furiously at the screen. Her fingers curved in a tight grip as her eyes flashed to mine. “Do you know what’s at 1523 East Eagle Street in Willow Springs, Georgia?”
I shook my head.
“A fucking bank!” Sterling let out a whoop, dropping her phone to drum her hands on the tabletop. “I knew it!” Picking her phone up again, she tapped the screen, her eyes flying over the page.
“What’s the rest of it?” I asked, pointing to her notes. KCUB. B42001. “What does that part mean?”
Sterling shook her head, chewing on her lower lip as she thought. “I don’t know. It’s too short to be an account number,” she mused and lifted her phone again, tapping and scrolling until she found what she was looking for. She read aloud, “Willow Springs Community Bank, which has been in operation since the mid-sixties, offers safe deposit box rentals.”
B42001. “Box 42001?” I asked. My mind raced—safe deposit boxes needed a key, and I didn’t have a key. My father died when I was thirteen. Seventeen years had passed. If there had been a key, I had no clue where it was. My mother had gotten rid of most of his things. Anyway, we’d needed the cash back then. If she’d had a key to a safe deposit box, she sure as hell would have opened it.
Maybe she had. Either way, we were going to find out.
I leaned forward, picked up the small statue of Emperor Vitellius, and turned it in my hands before I set it down in front of Sterling. “I guess this means we’re going to Willow Springs to see if we can talk our way inside a safe deposit box.”
“I guess we are,” Sterling said. “And we’re going to come back with a big-ass pile of money.”
She stuck out her hand, offering to touch me for the first time in a year. I took her hand in mine, savoring the brief contact. I hadn’t lied—I didn’t care about the money; I could always make more money. But there was only one Sterling, and I’d go to the ends of the earth to touch her again.
Willow Springs was just the beginning.